A handwritten letter from Albert Einstein about his thoughts on God, religion and his search for meaning will go up for sale in New York at the cost of up to $1.5 million, Christie’s said on Wednesday.
The one-and-a-half-page letter will go up on auction on December 4, 2018 after going on public view in New York from November 30 to December 3, and is estimated to fetch between $1 million and $1.5 million according to Christie’s. The letter was previously offered at auction in 2008, bought by a private collector for $4,04,000, Christie’s said.
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“The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends,” wrote the German physicist, best known for his theory of relativity.
This letter was written in German from Princeton, New Jersey to Eric Gutkind, a German philosopher, just a year before the theoretical physicist passed away in 1955.
The son of secular Ashkenazi Jews and forced to flee Germany after Adolf Hitler took power, Einstein did not exclude Judaism from his critique. “For me the unadulterated Jewish religion is, like all other religions, an incarnation of primitive superstition,” he writes to Gutkind.
“And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and in whose mentality I feel profoundly anchored, still for me does not have any different kind of dignity from all other people.
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“As far as my experience goes, they are in fact no better than other human groups, even if they are protected from the worst excesses by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot perceive anything ‘chosen’ about them.”
“It is one of the definitive statements in the religion vs science debate,” says Peter Klarnet speaking of the letter, senior specialist in books and manuscripts at the British auction company.
A note that Einstein had couriered in Tokyo briefly describing his theory on happy living sold at auction in Jerusalem for $1.56 million in October 2017, Winner’s auction house said.
“While Einstein letters and manuscripts appear with some frequency at auction, those of great importance and significance do not,” said Klarnet.
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“In the broadest sense, it is similar to Einstein’s 1939 letter to (US president) F.D.R. warning of German efforts to build the bomb that we sold for $2 million in 2002,” he added.
The letter has already been shown in Shanghai.